Corporal Sam and Other Stories eBook

As a ghost he awed them. For a moment he stood
looking from one to the other, and so, drawing the
charge, tossed the pistol back at its owner’s
feet and resumed his way.

Corporal Sam, who had merely seen the slight figure
pass beyond the edge of the dunes, went back and flung
himself again on the warm bank.

‘If a man did that wrong to me—­’
he repeated.

CHAPTER IV.

Certainly, just or unjust, the Marquis could make
himself infernally unpleasant. Having ridden
over from head-quarters and settled the plans for
the new assault, he returned to his main army and there
demanded fifty volunteers from each of the fifteen
regiments composing the First, Fourth, and Light Divisions—­men
(as he put it) who could show other troops how
to mount a breach. It may be guessed with
what stomach the Fifth Division digested this; and
among them not a man was angrier than their old general,
Leith, who now, after a luckless absence, resumed
command. The Fifth Division, he swore, could
hold their own with any soldiers in the Peninsula.
He was furious with the seven hundred and fifty volunteers,
and, evading the Marquis’s order, which was
implicit rather than direct, he added an oath that
these interlopers should never lead his men to the
breaches.

Rage begets rage. During the misty morning hours
of August 31st, the day fixed for the assault, these
volunteers, held back and chafing with the reserves,
could scarcely be restrained from breaking out of
the trenches. ‘Why,’ they demanded,
’had they been fetched here if not to show the
way?’—­a question for which their officers
were in no mood to provide a soft answer.

Yet their turn came. Sergeant Wilkes, that amateur
in siege-operations, had rightly prophesied from the
first that the waste of life at the breaches would
be wicked and useless until the hornwork had been
silenced and some lodgment made there. So as
the morning wore on, and the sea-mists gave place
to burning sunshine, and this again to heavy thunder-clouds
collected by the unceasing cannonade, still more and
more of the reserves of the Fifth Division were pushed
up, until none but the volunteers and a handful of
the 9th Regiment remained in the trenches. Them,
too, at length Leith was forced to unleash, and they
swept forward on the breaches yelling like a pack
of hounds; but on the crest-line they fared at first
no better than the regiments they had taunted.
Thrice and four times they reached it only to topple
back. The general, watching the fight from the
batteries across the Urumea, now directed the gunners
to fire over the stormers’ heads; and again
a cry went up that our men were being slaughtered
by their own artillery. Undismayed by this,
with no recollections of the first assault to daunt
them, a company of the Light Division took advantage
of the fire to force their way over the rampart on
the right of the great breach and seize a lodgment
in some ruined houses actually within the town.
There for an hour or so these brave men were cut
off, for the assault in general made no headway.